Storage jar by Cardew

Storage jar by Cardew

Storage jar by Cardew - 34" (863 mm) high. 1950s.

Michael Cardew was born in London in 1901. His parents had a summer home
in Devon and used to take him to the Fremington Pottery where they bought
pots from Edwin Beer Fishley. He loved these pots, much preferring them
to the more formal table ware at the family's winter residence in Wimbledon.
When Mr Fishley died, he realized that the pots he loved were gone forever;
no one else made pots like them. He studied at Oxford University, and in
his breaks, visited W Fishley Holland, Edwin Beer Fishley's
grandson, at the Braunton Pottery. William readily agreed to teach him to
throw for one pound a week. He heard about the St Ives Pottery, and on leaving
Oxford went to join Bernard Leach as a student.

Cardew stayed at St Ives until 1926 when he took over a disused pottery
near Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, five miles from Cheltenham. At Winchcombe Pottery he was joined by
Elijah Comfort, Sidney Tustin, and
in the following few pre-war years by Charlie Tustin and Ray Finch.

In 1939 he left Winchcombe Pottery in the capable hands of Ray Finch
and set up a new pottery at Wenford Bridge, on the edge of Bodmin
Moor in Cornwall.

During the war Cardew was a Pottery Instructor in Achimota College in
what is now Ghana - a Government backed venture that was to supply the whole
of West Africa with good quality pottery, but was a dismal failure. Back
home in 1945 he sold the Winchcombe Pottery to Ray Finch and then the
following year he returned to Africa to set up a pottery at Vumë on
the Volta river. This venture was to last until 1948 when a combination of
ill-health and civil unrest drove him home to England.

Ivan McMeekin, an Australian, had been looking after Wenford Bridge, and
on his return to England Cardew made him a partner. McMeekin carried on
in Cornwall while Cardew potted at Kingwood Pottery in Surrey. The items
made here differed very much from his African pieces due to the materials
available in Surrey that were not to be found in Africa. He made mainly
slip-decorated wares at Kingwood, but the shapes were in his now very
recognizable style. In 1949 he returned to Wenford Bridge, and the Kingwood
pieces, marked with a 'K' in a circle, are somewhat rare.

In 1950 he was appointed Pottery Officer in Nigeria. He started the Abuja Pottery, a training centre for
native potters, and would spend ten months of each year there, and two months
at Wenford Bridge, which was looked after by his partner, Ivan McMeekin.

His work in Nigeria was a Civil Service appointment - he was a British
civil servant when he started, but after 1960 when Nigeria gained its independence
he was a Nigerian civil servant - and when he reached the age of sixty-five
he had to retire. He visited both Abuja and Vumë after his retirement.
He carried on working at Wenford Bridge, and was joined there by his son,
Seth, in 1971. Many fine potters
were students at Wenford Bridge, including Svend Bayer, Clive Bowen, Michael OBrien and Danlami Aliyu.

Cardew taught by example, using few words. If handles were the topic
of the day he would take his student to a board of pots and say "You start
at that end, I'll start at this", and the student would watch the way Cardew
worked the handles and copy him. He did not criticise his students' work,
but would give lavish praise when he thought a pot was good. This is in
contrast to the Leach Pottery practice of breaking pieces that did not come
up to standard. Cardew was a naturally talkative man, but seldom offered
an opinion about something he didn't like. The students, of course, knew
what silence implied.

Cardew's stoneware and slip decorated earthenware pots are distinctive.
His work was exhibited widely, and he was awarded many honours before his
death in 1983.

He is remembered for his instructional book Pioneer Pottery and
his unfinished autobiography A Pioneer Potter, edited by his son
Seth and published after his death. Pioneer Pottery has been re-printed
and is now available.

In 1950 the Nigerian authorities asked Michael Cardew to become 'Pottery
Officer' with the aim of improving the quality of the local work. He spent
most of the next fifteen years there, having set up the Pottery Training
Centre at Abuja.

There were exhibitions of Abuja pottery in London in 1958, 1959 and 1962,
and another in Lagos in 1960. Cardew and some of the African potters, notably Ladi Kwali, gave lectures and demonstrations
in various parts of the world and Philip Rosenthal sponsored a European tour for
them in the mid-1960s.

Upon Cardew's retirement from the Nigerian Civil Service in 1965 the
running of Abuja was taken over by Michael "Seamus" OBrien. OBrien was
a student of Cardew's, but had a background in painting rather than pottery.
He had to learn on-the-fly - a task made more difficult when he was told
that the educational subsidy for training would stop and the pottery would
have to make a profit.

OBrien stayed until 1972 continuing Cardew's tradition of encouraging
the potters to make their own interpretation and decoration for the simple
basic shapes he had taught them. He managed to solve, or partially solve,
some of the technical problems that had beset Cardew, and further problems
with efficiency were also solved during OBrien's tenure. He was concerned
that the potters earned five shillings a day, and led a fairly easy life,
while farmers were earning two shillings a day and had to find £2-10s
once a year to pay their taxes. It was taking the kiln gang - six or seven
men - three weeks to cut sufficient wood for a firing. One day he took the
laziest man aside and sawed wood with him - one at each end of a bow saw
- and they finished the day with enough wood for a firing. The period allowed
for the gang to do the work was subsequently reduced from three weeks to
three days. In this and other ways OBrien managed to make the pottery pay
its way, or appear to pay its way to the satisfaction of the government.

The Abuja pottery, now known as the Dr Ladi Kwali Pottery, Suleja, is
still government owned, still active, but without the dynamism that made
it famous in its early days. The role of oil in the Nigerian economy made
keeping the pottery viable less important. Development is to be found in
some of the work by potters who once worked at Abuja and have now set up
their own workshops.

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